Unleashed: As You Go – Pray

Unleashed – As You Go – Pray

“The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters.” Revelation 1:13-14

This summer has been filled with lots of interesting events. Among them have been the push to remove paintings and statues dating back centuries of the “white” Jesus. Unfortunately, the movement doesn’t have anything to do with being Biblically correct, it has all to do with the new “cancel culture” movement sweeping our nation.

Thankfully Jesus chose a time in history when his disciples couldn’t pull out their iPhones and snap a selfie with him. The Bible doesn’t say a lot about Jesus’ physical description. A very powerful description of Jesus is found in Revelation 1:13-14 written by his good friend John, but equally powerful is John’s follow up description of Jesus. “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. Then he placed his right hand on me and said: “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades.” Revelation 1:17-18

We now live in a very ego-centric age that is totally self-absorbed with ourselves. We have at our finger -tips information about anything and everyone. We have access to more books, more pictures, more video clips than all the combined generations who lived before us. We are information statured but drowning in self-righteous indignation of the past. It does cause me to wonder how I would have depicted Jesus if I had been an artist living in a by-gone age without access to the internet, TV or modern printing capabilities; if I lived without the rich interrelationship of other cultures, ethic groups and languages; if I had never left my home town. Yet I wanted to share with my little world a reflection of the One I loved deeply, the one who had given me life. What would my Jesus look like on canvas? Somehow the finished piece would probably resemble the people in my world.

Connie and I have a fairly extensive collection of nativity sets from around the world. They are sets collected from the Maasai, Kikuyu, Shona, Tswana, Thai, European, Chilean, Peruvian, and countless other people groups. A most interesting feature common to each of them is that they picture Jesus looking just like them. As I take each set and unwrap each piece at Christmas I never get tired of marveling at the beauty and variety of the cultures of the world that call Jesus their Savior.

Billy Graham once shared a story from Cecil B. De Mille, a movie producer from an earlier era. Graham wrote that “Cecil B. DeMille once told me that his picture “The King of Kings” made during the silent-movie era, was seen by an estimated 800,000,000 people. I asked him why he did not reproduce “The King of Kings” with sound and color. He replied, “I will never be able to do it, because if I gave Jesus a southern accent, the northerners would not think of him as their Christ. If I gave him a foreign accent, the Americans and the British would not think of him as their Christ.” He said, “As it is, people of all nations, from every race, creed, clan, can accept him as their Christ.”

The writers of scripture didn’t concern themselves describing the physical qualities of Jesus, they solely focused on his character, his nature, his message to mankind. The problem comes when we expect every Jesus to look like us instead of us looking like Jesus.

We look like Jesus when we wash the feet of others who are struggling, broken and defeated.

We look like Jesus when we bring peace into the midst of conflict.

We look like Jesus when we take a loaf of bread to our neighbor.

We look like Jesus when we care for the sick and offer comfort to the dying.

We look like Jesus when we tuck our children into bed at night.

We look like Jesus when we share the love of Jesus with a lost world.

We look most like Jesus when we let Jesus take the brush from our hands, and he paints the picture of what He looks like for the world to see. A portrait where “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)

God is great,
Pastor Lynn Burton